Last Updated on October 1, 2024 by maximosecrets

Hello, and welcome back to Maximo Bite Size. A series of videos on the functional aspects of Maximo Manage.

Title

Good morning and welcome to the first episode in the series looking at the new features in Maximo Manage, for the release MAS 9.0. I’m Andrew Jeffery and today we’ll be discussing the Operational Dashboard and Work Queues. 

The New Features series will start with MAS 9.0 but I aiming to continue with MAS 9.1 when this is released in 2025. The focus of this series will be on those clients who are upgrading, but it will be useful for Maximo practitioners and sales teams, and also for clients new to Maximo Application Suite (MAS). Realistically it will only cover functional features found in Maximo Manage and not the other suite applications, nor new technical features, simply, I don’t have the bandwidth for these aspects.

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Learning Objectives

Today, we’ll be looking at both the Operational Dashboard and the Work Queue Manager applications, together they provide a modernised alternative to the Start Center, although in the MAS 9.0 release the Operational Dashboard can not be said to be a replacement of the Start Center. Before we discuss Work Queues I will discuss the differences found between the two.

So, let’s get started.

Operational Dashboard

The Operational Dashboard seen on the right is the default one called Maintenance Manager, it is actually a screenshot taken from MAS 8.11. In MAS 9.0 if you have the Health, Safety and Environment Manager (HSE) add-on installed, the default dashboard is called Emission Management.

The Operational Dashboard is the name of the application, the one you might search for in the left hand navigation bar, but it does appear at the top of the menu just below Start Center. In MAS 9.0 support is provided for multiple tabs (dashboards) and Maintenance Manager or Emission Management are the names of a dashboard.

In MAS 9.0 there is now an action Create Dashboard where you provide the Name, Description, whether the dashboard is to be shared (Public) or whether it will remain Private and visible to only the creator of the dashboard. You can also make a dashboard the default, which places it as the first one, on the left. The Manage Dashboards action shows you the set of dashboards which you have access to, so that you can change the order, change the name or description, make a private dashboard public (or vice versa), hide or unhide a dashboard, or delete a dashboard.

As you might expect there are some application signature options which you will find in Security Groups and the Applications tab for the Operational Dashboard. You need to provide Read access to see the Operational Dashboard and there are options to Create Private Dashboard and Create Public Dashboard. You can hide and delete a private dashboard but for public ones, the signature options are Hide Public Dashboard and Delete Public Dashboard. The other addition to Security Groups is a new tab called Operational Dashboard where you select the public dashboards relevant to a security group.

The Operational Dashboard is created with the configuration tool in the Maximo Application Framework (MAF) and this uses Object Structures. When testing a user’s dashboard (and you really ought to do this), you may receive an error BMXAA0024E saying that an action is not allowed on an object, the most common one starts “The action READ is not allowed on object VIEWMANAGER.” You do need to grant Object Structure access rights for the same security group, some object structures include MXAPIVIEWMANAGER, MXAPIWORKQUEUE, MXAPIWFASSIGNMENT and MXAPIPERSON.

You can also duplicate a dashboard, when saving you can Save As.

In the screenshot on the right I am editing the HSE dashboard called Emission Management, you can see that it is marked as a Public dashboard . This would appear to the right of the dashboard description if there had been one. On the right is the Card Gallery , note there is no Workflow card, I’ll come back to this point. When you have finished editing you can use the blue Save button , or use the drop down to find the option Save As which duplicates a dashboard.

Each card has a Basic and an Advanced tab. The two screenshots on the left are those for the Work Queue card. On the Basic tab you provide the Card Title, a Description that appears when you hover-over the title and you select a card size, in this case Medium width and Regular height. The Subtitle field is read-only for some cards as it is for the Work Queue card, and the Card Width and Height field may also be read-only. 

The Advanced tab is different for each type of card. In the case of the Work Queue card you select the work queues to display, the Rows per Page, and whether Available Actions should appear, the choice is either None or something specific to the card, and this enables some options in the top right of the card when the dashboard is rendered.

The Emission Management dashboard has a set of four KPI Value cards along the top row . Beneath this and to the left is the Favorites card with the Quick Actions card beside it to the right. On the right below the third and fourth KPI Value cards is a KPI Comparison card shown in bar format. This can show up to 20 KPIs in bar, pie, line or donut format. Below this is the Work Queues card . There is a vertical scroll bar to allow more cards to be shown.

Currently, the most useful cards to use are KPI Value, KPI Trend, KPI Comparison, Favorites, Quick Action, Work Queue, External Content and the Workflow cards. The Value and Threshold Tile cards are currently identical, I wouldn’t use the Threshold Tile until we know what it will be used for, they both show a single value taken from somewhere in Maximo and you need to configure a data source for this. The Table card will also require the configuration of a data source. A KPI Value card can be used instead of Value or Threshold Tile cards and perhaps a work queue set up instead of the Table card. I can’t see why these three cards will be needed especially as they require the data source configuration.

There is no Workflow card in the Card Gallery, it is a special one as it allows you to interact with your workflow assignments, launching the application to view the record, routing or reassigning the workflow and providing a comment. The Emission Management dashboard doesn’t have a workflow card, and one cannot be added to it. If you have deleted the Maintenance Manager dashboard, you have no ability to create a dashboard with the card with the title Workflow assignments due soon, so my advice is, do not delete the card or the dashboard where it exists.

There are two detailed articles on Maximo Secrets for the Operational Dashboard.

Differences with Start Centers

The Operational Dashboard is not yet a replacement for the Start Centers, whether it will be we will need to wait to find out, but I expect most of the Start Center functionality to be eventually found in the Operational Dashboard.

The Result Set portlet, typically many are used per Start Center, is being replaced with the Work Queue card. One card will replace multiple portlets, with potential performance improvements, but that still needs to be validated. The Work Queue card as we will later find out has personalisation, can be associated with one or more person groups, and you can apply actions against the result set, a bit like you can in the List tab of some applications. But while it has a table with a set of columns, the attributes can only come from the main object of an object structure, you can not reference attributes from another object as you can with a Result Set. There is no graphing option with a work queue as there is with a result set.

A small point perhaps but the Quick Actions card cannot reference and apply a Ticket Template as it can for the similar portlet on the Start Center.

There are two portlets on the Start Center which will not yet be found on the Operational Dashboard, Bulletin Board and Report List, perhaps this is where the Table card will be used in the future. I wondered whether to also include here the Inbox/Assignments portlet for Workflow, on the basis that it doesn’t exist in the Card Gallery, but it does at least exist in the default dashboard. The KPI Trend and External Content cards on the Operational Dashboard are examples where it has added cards that are not available to the Start Centers, and we can see additional capability in the KPI Comparison card as to choice of chart type, and date range, and if you look hard enough you can find little details you won’t find in the Start Centers.

This last point illustrates that the Operational Dashboard has future potential. We are still at the relative starting point of its development and I expect enhancements to continue in this area for many future releases to come, as the design team leverages other dashboard technology that is available. Maps is an obvious one that I expect to appear in the future as you can find it elsewhere in other MAS applications. I doubt whether the Start Centers will be enhanced in the future. 

Work Queues

The Work Queue Manager is an application that will be found in the Administration module and is shown on the right. It is where you create new work queues and edit existing ones. It is only used in conjunction with the Operational Dashboard.

When creating a new work queue a three step wizard approach is used. The first step is Define Work Queue where you provide a name, a description (its purpose), and a priority relative to other work queues, a range 1-4 where 1 is urgent and 4 is low. In this first page you can also associate one or more person groups, but this is optional. If no person groups then the work queue is considered public, but it still needs to be selected in the Work Queue card of an Operational Dashboard. If you add a Person Group then it is considered private to the members of that person group.

The second step is Define Query. You select an Object Structure, a Query, and a Launch Application. The query can be selected from either the object structure itself, or an application that shares the same top-level object in the object structure. The work queue defaults to Active state. You then decide which attributes of the parent object you wish to display and in which order.

The third step Add Actions, is optional. You can select actions that will be found in the Actions application for the same parent object. For example if the object structure is based on Service Requests, you could choose actions to change status to queued, apply an SLA, or create a follow-up work order. The third page is where you find the blue background Create or Update buttons.

To edit a work queue a button appears on the right when you hover over the record. To delete a work queue you must first make it inactive. 

The work queues are specified in the Advanced tab of the Work Queue card of the Operational Dashboard, we saw this earlier. The work queue name has a hyperlink which opens the work queue full screen. This shows the records of the work queue defined by the query and the attributes that you define in the second step of the wizard, a table of data, much like the List tab of an application.

Where there is a difference with the Start Center Result Set portlet is that there is a selection box down the left hand side, and if you select at least one record the blue background set of actions that you defined in the third step of the wizard are displayed, as seen in the image. You can perform actions on one or multiple records as you can from the List tab of a classic application.

There are also a set of buttons above the table. The Search opens a search bar, the Download button downloads the data to a spreadsheet, the Filter button opens a filter row below the column headings, like it does with the table window in a classic application. The Manage Columns opens a row of black background buttons where you can change the order of the columns and the right-hand end button, which is also called Manage Columns, opens a dialog where you can select the columns you wish to be displayed, currently these are only attributes from the parent object.

If you add or remove columns, add filters or sort columns, these are changes that are made to your personal settings for the work queue and will be remembered the next time you log in. You will find out in the next video in this series that the List tab of the new Work Orders application, goes further than this and I am wondering what enhancements we might see in work queues in future releases.

The Reset button will give you a warning message “If you reset the table, the original layout is restored, and any personalizations that you made are lost. This action cannot be undone.”. It restores the work queue to how it is defined in the Work Queue Manager.

Finally, if you hover over a record a button called View Record will appear and this will launch the application defined in the second part of the wizard and retrieve the same record. There is no action yet to launch the entire result set in this application.

There is a detailed article on Maximo Secrets for Work Queues.

Thank you for watching

I hope you have enjoyed this video on the MAS 9.0 Operational Dashboard and Work Queues and found it useful and thank you for watching. We would like to see you back in our next episode when we will be reviewing the new Work Orders application. Don’t forget to hit the Subscribe button, and if you enjoyed this video, please give it a thumbs up.

It was a new music track for this series on MAS 9.0 new features, it is called … from the group called TrackTribe, do check them out on track tribe .com, all one word (tracktribe.com). 

Until another time, Goodbye.